On March 3, I wrote about a 2009 salary report for the Tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) published by placement company Bluewolf, which also has a side business of remote database administrator services. I noticed a couple of areas of salary growth in IT mentioned in the report and wondered why Bluewolf hadn't really explained in any detail the increases for network management positions (14 percent) or e-commerce positions (5 percent).

I put the following questions to Bluewolf co-founder and Principal Michael Kirven to try and get some sense of the changes in 2009.

Why are network managers seeing a 14 percent salary spike?

There are a variety of reasons that the salary for network managers has increased, for this demanding, 24/7 job. There is a scarcity of network managers, and H-1B candidates are rarely network managers. [There is] the added importance of network management to the organization as it has become the backbone of businesses over the last five years, with network managers overseeing global operations, mashups and dozens of technologies. Also, security has become more important and network managers need to understand security holes and vulnerabilities.

Why are e-commerce analysts on average seeing a 5 percent raise?

Most businesses are doing e-commerce now that the cost of entry has dropped by 80 percent. There is a shortage of skilled e-commerce analysts that understand the nuances of the space. Importantly, companies are investing in positions that generate revenue, and e-commerce generates revenue.

Any other trends for 2009 you think worth mentioning?

Open-source skills continue to be in high demand, such as LAMPStack, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, Vend and .NET Framework. IT professionals with those open-source skills will have multiple job opportunities.

The strange thing is that Bluewolf's salary report doesn't really call out open-source-specific jobs, but it's easy to see where open source would be in demand in terms of development, architecture and system administration.